Security Aspects in Radio Frequency Identification Systems

Radio frequency identification technology is becoming ubiquitous, and as an unfortunate side effect, more and more authentication solutions come with more security issues. In former contributions, the authors introduced a solely hash-based secure authentication algorithm that is capable of providing protection against most of the well-known attacks and performs exceptionally well even in very large systems. The authors gave a theoretical analysis of Simple Lightweight Authentication Protocol (SLAP) protocol from security and performance point of view. This chapter gives a detailed examination of small computational capacity systems from the point of view of security. The authors define the model of attacker and the well-known attacks which can be achieved in these kinds of environments. Furthermore, the chapter gives a summary of the significant RFID authentication protocols which are found in literature. The authors present several lightweight authentication protocols and some novel elliptic curve cryptography based methods. Besides, the chapter illustrates the SLAP protocol’s performance characteristics with measurements carried out in a simulation environment and compares with the theoretical results. The authors show the effects of numerous attacks and the system’s different parameters on the authentication time. Finally, the chapter examines the performance and security characteristics of two other protocols chosen from the literature in order to compare to SLAP algorithm and give proper explanation for the differences between them.